The Methodology of Understanding the Qur'an in Elahi Ardabili's Interpretation

"Kamal al-din Hossain Elahi Ardabili" is one of the Shiite scholars in the late ninth and first half of the tenth century AH. He is a commentator, theologian, philosopher, jurisconsult, and usulist who has written more than thirty works in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish languages. Elhi Ardabili has a commentary including Surah Hamd and the opening verses of Surah Baqarah in Arabic, the manuscript of which has recently been corrected and researched by "Ali Sadraei Khoei" and "Soraya Ghotbi". The present study, with a descriptive-analytical method, investigates the methods of understanding the Holy Quran based on the text of the verse and beyond the text of the verse in the interpretation of "Elahi Ardabili". The findings of the research indicate that Elahi at the textual level, by analyzing the text of the verse and scrutinizing linguistic levels, including Quranic vocabulary including etymology and derivation, expressing the meaning of words, semantic relations and grammar, and at the literary level by using the knowledge of rhetoric, attempts to achieve a deeper understanding of the verses of the Qur'an. At the level beyond the text of the verse, he has interpreted the verses of the Qur'an by dealing with texts related to the verse and by relying on intratextual relationships including similar verses and intertextual relationships with narrative texts and other interpretations. The result is that although Elahi Ardabili paid more attention to linguistic and literary studies in his interpretation, he did not adhere to a specific method in his interpretations and turned to the interpretation of the Holy Qur'an with a comprehensive ijtihad method.